Welcome to Your Voice Election 2017. This is your opportunity to speak out against how the neoliberal welfare state has hurt you and continues to hurt you.

This is your chance to let the rest of New Zealand know as they enter the voting booths in 2017, that the punitive, spiteful and damaging social welfare policies of WINZ, Housing NZ, Corrections, Parole, Ministry of Social Development and CYFs really are to every day New Zealanders.

There are almost 300 000 beneficiaries in New Zealand, yet their voice and true political muscle are ignored and forgotten. The Daily Blog offers you a chance to take back some mana and have the empowerment of a platform that will amplify your truth.

One of the shocking things I have found when talking to beneficiaries, prisoners and people requiring Government assistance of any kind is the level of fear so many feel about being able to step up and criticise the terrible service and polices they are forced to endure.

That’s why we are offering to provide you with a platform for your voice while hiding your identity.

Use the form provided here to contact us with your story of how the policies of WINZ, Housing NZ, Corrections, Parole, Ministry of Social Development and CYFs have actually hurt, not helped you.

We will contact you via the contacts you provide to check and verify your story. We will review what you have written, and as long as it isn’t defamatory, we will publish it and give you a voice in this election.

Our Guarantee: The Daily Blog considers whistleblowers and the Whistleblower laws in NZ to be an important function of our democracy.

We therefore guarantee that we will not identify you as a source of this tip off information unless you expressly state a preference that we do so.

Once certain of its veracity, your voice will be published anonymously so that Government Agencies can’t identify you and your experience will be shared.

It’s time the rest of the New Zealand voting public understood just how harsh the neoliberal welfare state is.

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7 Comments

I just like to register my fury against these neo liberal globalists – over 30 years of theft of the community , the individual – and 32 years of such things as the Employment Contracts Act – despite them trying to give it another name – ripping off MY and OTHERS wages , and then with the audacity to try and suggest the economy’s doing OK and enabling unscrupulous employers to give instant dismissal if employees join a union !.

OK for some – not the homeless family’s sleeping in their damn cars- WHILE working !!!

Id like to discover just WHERE all the money went that was made from selling off OUR state owned assets and just WHO really benefited. State owned assets that WE once owned and paid for with OUR taxes!

I’d like to revisit Roger Douglas’s , Jenny Shipley’s and Ruth Richardson’s bullsarse bald faced lies about how the free market would lower prices for consumers by creating a non existent ‘ competition ‘ – when they really meant creating privatized monopoly’s that price gouged the very services we once owned. With them and their mates owning large amounts of shares and trusts that covered their trail in making huge profits out of the New Zealand public.

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Here is an example of what I mean in how most New Zealanders have been kept in the dark and treated like mushrooms while VAST amounts of money are being either moved into the pockets of foreigners or secreted away by a select few local individuals :

Most New Zealanders are not aware of the colossal dollar value in minerals in and around our shores and in our National Parks – yet the bankers and investors have known about it for years – including our own politicians.

And that’s one of the reasons prosecutions and the reentry into Pike River is really being stonewalled.

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The “in-ground resource value” of New Zealand’s extensive ironsand deposits could be between $1 trillion and $5 trillion, says state-owned energy company Solid Energy.

The iron ore contained in ironsands off the west coast of the North Island has been estimated to be worth a trillion dollars, but Solid Energy chief executive Don Elder said that “the industry view is increasingly that (the value) could be substantially greater than that”.

The final value would depend on the price of steel, and the availability of technology to smelt ironsands, he told Parliament’s commerce select committee yesterday.

“Resources are attracting margins or profits in the order of 20 percent of the revenue.”

Prices seen in 2008 would mean profit margins of 50 percent or “significantly higher” could be available from ironsands.

A New Zealand-based company, Trans Tasman Resources Ltd (TTR), and overseas rivals are looking at exploiting New Zealand ironsands, and TTR has suggested that a domestic steel mill could use local high-grade coking coal to refine the ironsands.

Dr Elder said Chinese companies had cheaper labour and capital and could do such projects faster, but New Zealand had an advantage in the availability of the water needed for such a refinery.

“If you could process those in New Zealand, it’s a much much better value opportunity and would certainly compete with doing the same thing in China under the right circumstances, with the right technology”.

Here is the link , however you will have to manually type much of it .

Not only did Peter Whittal escape prosecution by having Worksafe NZ do a deal with his insurance company and pay out over 1 million dollars and then be able to leave the country a free man – as to date , – there have been NO prosecution’s for one of New Zealand’s biggest workplace disaster’s in decades.

Pike River was ONE of the mines that was envisioned to help supply that ‘high quality coking coal’ for the NZ iron sand smelting process….

As well… the same company that owned the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia , USA , … that had a similar methane /coal dust explosion killing 29 workers with only 2 escaping ( just like Pike River) … several months before Pike River – also had financial interests in Pike River.

AND IN CASE YOU THINK THIS GOVT HAS NOTHING TO ANSWER REGARDING PIKE RIVER ….

Here is a link to the to a parallel coal mine explosion and just how effective an open system of govt that allows unbiased investigations to take place can be in bringing those to justice who have acted callously , irresponsibly and unethically. Unlike the current neo liberal government .

This demonstrates EXACTLY where these globalist neo liberals place the value of human life and what lengths they will go cover things up.

So here is the link to the Upper Big Branch coal mining explosion investigation in Tennessee that ALSO killed 29 miners several months before Pike River.

I work as an administrator in a home care agency. About 45k mostly women are in this industry in NZ. Yet the wages for these qualified and experienced women are so low many have to depend on WINZ for top-ups. The funding for their work is from the government. Pay them what they deserve for this valued and difficult work! Director General’s report Aug 2015 gives recommendations but let’s see the budget to fund this, National Government.

That means the question really is whether Labour will commit to meaningful change? It’s very easy to say “Labour’s better than National”, but people forget so easily:

1. the damage Labour’s done to the poor;
2. its refusal to renounce that behaviour;
3. its support of nat anti-beneficiary legislation;
4. and its silence on what its got planned for the future, exactly what it’s done over the last 8elections.

People who care about the poor need to wake up to what Labour’s been doing over the past decade or so, and how the party’s shown nothing to suggest anything’s going to change soon.

Personally, I’ve found that even worse than the ever increasing financial stress/hoop jumping/dealing with the system in general, is how-somehow- subsequent governments (with the help of the media) have done such a brilliant job with their divide and rule campaign, vilified beneficiaries to the point that we’re to blame to the GFC and everything else wrong with the universe, and somehow managed to convince a good proportion of the general public that we are the lowest form of life there is.

Knowing that my government literally don’t care if I live or die (and would probably be quite glad of the latter because it would make their welfare statistics look better), and that a lot of my fellow citizens seriously think that somehow I’m scum of the earth for the simple reason I NEED a benefit just to pay the bills and they somehow think they’re personally paying for my cushy lifestyle choice. That’s way worse than having to ration my non-funded medication (a lot of us are having to do that now btw); knowing you’re despised by so many people just for existing.

Well done NZ, this is what you’ve become.
Martyn- will you be forwarding submissions to the politicians and media once collated? An excellent and much needed project, but also preaching to the converted if it stays on this site. Nothing surprises or shocks us anymore. It will need to get into the public arena somehow.

[…] Have you been treated poorly by our neoliberal welfare state and wish to bring attention to your experience anonymously so that they can’t punish you? Check out our 2017 election campaign to do just that. […]

[…] Have you been treated poorly by our neoliberal welfare state and wish to bring attention to your experience anonymously so that they can’t punish you? Check out our 2017 election campaign to do just that. […]

[…] Have you been treated poorly by our neoliberal welfare state and wish to bring attention to your experience anonymously so that they can’t punish you? Check out our 2017 election campaign to do just that. […]